Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anne TylerEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-10-26
ISBN: 0345477243
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Back When We Were Grownups
Book Review: Can you change your life?
Summary: 5 Stars
Rebecca Davitch enables others to have parties. At times they respond grumpily. Not surprisingly she met her husband, Joe Davitich, at a party at the Davitch house. Joe died before he was forty. When Rebecca met Joe he already had three children, but his wife had absconded. Thus, Rebecca had three stepdaughters. Joe was the person who started the party business, calling it the Open Arms. Instead of having a guest house it was decided to have parties. Rebecca loved children, but sometimes found it tiring to speak in her 'grandmother' voice.
Zeb was Rebecca's kid brother-in-law although he was no longer a kid and didn't live in the same house anymore. He and Rebecca had come to behave like a couple. Rebecca had dropped out of college to marry Joe. (A history professor had wanted her to expand a paper into an honors project.)
It seems that Open Arms is always beset by disaster. The family had its own celebrations on Thursdays so that there would be no interference with paying guests. Unfortunately NoNo, a Davitch daughter, wanted to have an outdoor wedding during a heatwave and drought. Through careful planning something resembling a garden and a green lawn is devised.
When his first wife visited them, (she appears for the wedding in current time because she is the mother of the bride), Rebecca was driven to feel that beneath Joe's exuberance there had been desperation. On the occasion of Rebecca's going to the ER with Poppy, Joe's great uncle nearly one hundred years old, Rebecca has the thought that she would be able to rate Baltimore's emergency rooms. In the end Poppy's difficulty is just a case of indigestion. Rebecca is led to realize then that Joe would have become a fine old man.
The author deals with life's stages and ties in elevating and humorous fashion.
Summary of Back When We Were Grownups
"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel.The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else?s?
On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation?something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family?s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.
Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it?how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been?is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.
As always with Anne Tyler?s novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser.
From the Hardcover edition.
The first sentence of Anne Tyler's 15th novel sounds like something out of a fairy tale: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." Alas, this discovery has less to do with magic than with a late-middle-age crisis, which is visited upon Rebecca Davitch in the opening pages of Back When We Were Grownups. At 53, this perpetually agreeable widow is "wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part." Given her role as the matriarch of a large family--and the proprietress of a party-and-catering concern, the Open Arms--Rebecca is both personally and professionally inclined toward jollity. But at an engagement bash for one of her multiple stepdaughters, she finds herself questioning everything about her life: "How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who's not really me?"
She spends the rest of the novel attempting to answer these questions--and trying to resurrect her older, extinguished self. Should she take up the research she began back in college on Robert E. Lee's motivation for joining the Confederacy? More to the point, should she take up with her college sweetheart, who's now divorced and living within easy striking range? None of these quick fixes pans out exactly as Rebecca imagines. What she emerges with is a kind of radiant resignation, best expressed by 100-year-old Poppy on his birthday: "There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be." A tautology, perhaps, but Tyler's delicate, densely populated novel makes it stick.
Yes, Poppy. There are also characters named NoNo, Biddy, and Min Foo--the sort of saccharine roll call that might send many a reader scampering in the opposite direction. But Tyler knows exactly how to mingle the sweet with the sour, and in Back When We Were Grownups she manages this balancing act like the old pro she is. Even the familiar backdrop--shabby-genteel Baltimore, which resembles a virtual game preserve of Tylerian eccentrics--seems freshly observed. Can any human being really resist this novel? It is, to quote Rebecca, "a report on what it was like to be alive," and an appealingly accurate one to boot. --James Marcus
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